What's going on everyone? Welcome back to another awesome episode here on the epic gardening

podcast. I am Kevin and I am joined again by Nancy Hayden. She is the co-owner of the Farm Between in Vermont and she's the co-author of farming on the wild side which is going to be in the podcast description so feel free and I would implore you to grab a copy of it because it's a great fantastic book and we've been talking about that a little bit in yesterday's show and I think a great topic that I've probably covered more than many topics I'm so interested in it Nancy is

Native plants and and specifically what that does to the insect population around your farm or around your garden.

So could you maybe talk a little bit about some of the things you noticed at the farm

between when you started introducing more of that?

Um, sure. introducing more of that? Sure. So I think the importance of native plants is really that they provide food for native insects.

And some of those native insects

are gonna be past, so-called past,

I put little quotes on it.

But those pests are providing food

for the predators and the other types of insects as well as birds are going to be eating some of those pests and things like that.

So if you don't have some of those around in some ways all the time, then you're not going to have

the types of predatory insects and parasitic insects and birds that you want to have so that when you do have an outbreak of a past

they are there to try to handle some of the outbreak.

So it's really a whole web of life

that you're creating when you use native, when you plant a lot of diversity of native plants because then you're going to get a diversity of insects and that's going to kind of create this whole pest management system for you.

And, you know, a lot of native insects have evolved with native plants so when people bring

non-natives into their yard because they don't get little holes in them from caterpillars or other insects.

It's because their native insects from across the planet

aren't here and our native insects cannot eat them.

So I think there was a recent study that

even like 30% non-native plants in your yard can have a significant impact

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